Satiric Stock

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between shops and stock. It uses the diverse and voluminous publishing career of Isaac Cruikshank to explore how stock came to market. It argues that the degradation of plates, the technological constraints that hindered swift responses to scandal and sensation, and a thriving market in illegal copies of various forms, required publishers of satirical prints to be flexible in how they approached purchasing plates, making reproductions, and selling impressions. It takes a corpus level quantitative approach to Isaac Cruikshank’s work as a window into the ideas that print publishers believed the market could bear, the chain of patronage an artist-engraver relied upon to make profitable his part of the business of satirical prints.